Language is key. Who says your perpetuator has to be in the frame? Why not yourself? Is it not more empowering to say, 'I am a survivor' without referring once to them by name, or identifiable detail? If their behaviour was that criminal, surely other people would work that out for themselves?

The welfare system, not benefit claimants, deserves the full, unmitigated might of British grumbling. Why? Because the current system does not reward any attempt to find work and no one should be expected to develop a social conscience while foregoing personal gain.

So who are the people on benefits, really? The answer actually seems to be most of us. 64% of families, and about 30million individual people - half the total population of the UK. The people on benefits are our friends, colleagues and neighbours, our families, ourselves.

On Monday the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, was challenged by a northern market stall trader to live on £53 a week. This concept caught fire as an online petition was set up and quickly received over 450k signatures.

In love? No one else approves? Clearly, suicide is the solution - but not until you've taken out your wife's cousin then her other cousin - who is also, somehow, her fiancé. No, it's not something the Mormons dreamed up, it's what kids are learning in a school near you, in shameless Shakespeare's rogue tragedy Romeo and Juliet.

This week accusations flew, rhetoric abounded and, with the Philpott case, one newspaper made a particularly grotesque leap to try and paint this convicted criminal as a poster-boy for what they decried as the welfare "lifestyle". Meanwhile, on the ground, huge changes are taking place to benefits that will affect millions of ordinary - and, dare we say it - hard-working families.

Why do those on benefits have to be caricatured or characterised in one way or another at all? There are thousands of decent, 'normal' people who are genuinely impoverished, and try to make ends meet as best they can

It's the controlling aspect of Philpott's personality which appears most relevant. The welfare benefits aspect of the tragedy has preoccupied the media, but Philpott's behaviour was not that psychologically unique in terms of what the research on filicide reveals.

As our television screens and newspapers were filled this week with endless images of Kim Jong-un and Mick Philpott, I wasn't worrying about threats posed by North Korea or narcissistic killers. I was wishing more people read Theodor Adorno.

Mick Philpott did not commit this crime because he was on benefits, but because of the narcissistic and controlling person he was. It would be a backwards step in our understanding of human behaviour if we start viewing people's actions through a prism of their income. The Philpott children were much loved; they had siblings and extended family who will undoubtedly be suffering terribly from their loss. I hope that Mick Philpott's living children will be supported not stigmatised, as Fred West's children have been, by dint of birth through their grief.